20 Mysterious Events That Are Almost Impossible To Explain

There’s nothing like an intriguing mystery to pique the imagination. Nonetheless, it has to be said that even in the strangest of cases, there’s usually a rational explanation. But not always – and here we bring you 20 events that left scientists struggling to come up with an answer. From spontaneous human combustion to a ghost ship and an unruly poltergeist, there’s plenty here to marvel over.

20. Disappearing pilot

It was in March 2017 that Xin Rong, a 27-year-old Chinese student at the University of Michigan, hired a single-engine plane. His flight plan was to take off from Ann Arbor Municipal Airport and then land at Harbor Springs, also in Michigan. But Rong never arrived in Harbor Springs, and his crashed plane was later found some 15 miles from Manitouwadge, Ontario. Rong wasn’t in the plane, however, and a body has never been found.

19. The Tunguska event

A massive explosion, said to be over 150 times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb, leveled almost 800 square miles of remote Siberian forest in June 1908. Incredibly, the blast apparently resulted in just one human casualty – a deer herder – although a large number of reindeer were incinerated. Many have claimed that the explosion was caused by a meteor or comet, yet no crater was found, nor any pieces of meteoric rock. Other explanations have included everything from a UFO crash to a nuclear explosion.